An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Vivek Santayana (Postdoctoral Fellow 2021-22; University of Edinburgh)
When the Subaltern Dance: Embodied Resistance to Epistemic Injustice in Mimi Mondal’s ‘His Footsteps, through Darkness and Light'
In her paper ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak poses this question to interrogate structures of epistemic violence faced by people in the lowest strata of society. She interrogates the structures and discursive practices that marginalise and silence these subaltern voices. My paper seeks to explore forms of articulation through which these subaltern peoples are able to resist this silencing. In the short story ‘His Footsteps, through Darkness and Light’, Mimi Mondal, a Dalit writer from India, explores how performance, through dance and circus acrobatics, presents a form of embodied resistance to this silencing. To these ends, I will examine the structures of oppression faced by lower-caste, ‘untouchable’ circus performers as well as the Devadasis, or temple courtesans. These communities navigate a society that is striated by wealth and caste, where Devadasis are effectively treated as property for the ruling raja and the temple. All of these subaltern communities, however, are defined by a form of performance. These characters harness the corporeality of their art to create a form of embodied knowledge as a means of rejecting the discursive structures that oppress and marginalise them. Embodied knowledge, I argue, represents a form of knowledge that exposes the oppressive hierarchies of power and further articulates a mode of its contestation. This embodied knowledge conveys what Jose Medina terms an epistemology of resistance. This epistemology presents a radical, alternative imaginary in opposition to the rhetorical silencing that the Brahminical caste in savarna society inflict upon the Dalit and devadasi characters. Thus while the subaltern may be silenced from speaking, I argue that it is through these embodied forms of performance that they resist the epistemic violence inflicted upon them.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
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